It's hard to be a hero...

[al0ne.in.the.dark]

--- I missplaced this post in the german forum, so I place it here again ---

Dear Origins Team,

thanks again for the great patch, the fast hotfix and the work you are probably doing for origins mod right now
After my last thread was focusing on the singleplayer-disadvantage of getting a Level4-Blueprint, this post is about your changes in the Humanity system.

But lets get back in time. As you started in Taviana as a Freshy you had a hard decission to make. Am I a good guy? Or am I bad. It was also a decisson for your playstyle. Sure, as a bandit you could nearly kill everything to take you up to level 3. As a hero it was a bit tricky... Stay away for bigger fights to prevent killing other heros. Kill a few Zombies here and get a mate out of mess, bandaging and bloddbagging him. And IF there was time (or only few players online) take a SAW and get rid of lots of Zombies.

In fact hero and bandit were equal. As bandit you could kill everything walking around, as hero you had the advantage of killing Zombies. All was fine. We had heros and bandits.

Back to now. For bandits all stayed the same. Beside the fact that Zombies give less humaity then tehy did before. Yeah, we all see those bandits smiling.
But what about our hero-friend from ancient times? He tries to keep his playstyle alife. Kills Zombies and from time to time a bandit. Because he has to defend himself he also murders another hero. After praing for him he leaves to farm some more Zombies to make himself feel better and increase humanity. He kills 15 of them in a bloody killstreak and nothing happend... Nothing? Oh, there is a amount of humanity gained. Only possible to see with glasses and cute as babycats. He is killing more and more zombies. After 300 Zombies-corpses lying on the ground the makes a rest. And feels a bit better. He can feel his humanity increases. While having a drink and looking into the stars he hears a shot. Turns around and the last thing he could see was that bandit guy sneaking out of a bush. Then all becomes dark.

As he came back he felt as bad as before. All the killed undeads were not worth this single attack of a cruel bandit.

--- What I want to say ---

As you keept the machanics for bandits the same and supported them by reducing the amount of humaity gained for killing zeds, you took the heros only advantage against bandits. The possibility to gain humanity on a very special way.
If I wanna fight the whole day I would choose the bandits path. Good for every PvP-player and also for bigger clans with a good mix.
But if I dont wanna fight the whole day, I choose the hero-path and land up in a mess. For getting level 4 it needs 10.000 humanity after reaching level 3 (at 15.000). This means a) around 3300 Zombies or b) going for fights with bandits.
So what you did is forcing heros to become the same PvP-based kind of players as bandits are, with the disadvantage that they are not allowed to kill other heros or survivors. At this moment the choice to be a hero is useless and pushes origins mod in direction of PvP-only. I play on a normal server myself but I feel bad for all those players on PvE-servers as well as for those who try to be a hero on a normal and well populated server. I am a level 3 hero at the moment with about 18.000 humanity but I really think about becoming bandit level 4 because I think it is much faster than getting to hero4 (without being boosted by mates).

I hope you can think about the humanity system again and make heros and bandits more even as they have been times ago.
Best regards and thanks for reading

l0ne

[GeriX]

Hello l0ne!

First of all thank you very much for your time and comitment, writing such a text!
As we all know in game development, balancing is one of the hardest aspects and it is nearly impossible to create a perfect balance, as always people will see things differently and unbalanced.
The thing with the heros is, that before the patch, they could quite easily gain tons of humanity just by sitting around and killing zombies, whereas the bandits needed to get into fights, with the risk of loosing
their gear and humanity. You could observe, that when a server wiped within a few days, there already were lvl3 heros, but only low level bandits.

I'd see the bandits as the risky role, where you can get quickly much humanity, but also loose it in the next moment, whereas the Hero is more of the steady guy, who gets the humanity over time, but with lower risk.

Despite all this I agree with your statement, that the hero is now more likely forced to kill other players, but this really depends on each persons playstyle. If somebody really wants to be a hero, he manages to stay out of conflicts,
as there is almost always a chance of getting out of combat. If somebofy else wants to get the Mansion fast, he will have to take the risk.


But of course this is no final state of the system and there will never be and we are thankfull for any critics and any suggestion, although it might not seem so, because we can't always answer etc.
We will wait how the current concept works out and adjust it then.

Greedings

GeriX and Origins Mod Team

[WrongNumber]

The problem is that once you pass level 3 hero you get around 45 points per bump. Conversely, one death can cost you 1500 points. I went from 18000 humanity down to around 16000 after one Sec B attempt. Over the next couple of days I gained maybe 500 or so back. I then had an accidental death (DC) followed by a second death at Mitro when I spawned in the middle of the mission there. Same thing, a day or two of gaining a few hundred back when I was forced to kill someone. This dropped me below level 3! I don't see the point of spending hours on end farming humanity and have to say that the new system makes being a hero near impossible unless you farm.